Breaking An Industry Into Little Pieces
From the gush and glitz of Oscar night coverage, you'd never know that Hollywood is a deeply troubled enterprise.
There will always be a demand for entertainment of course, and moving pictures will continue to dominate the entertainment industry for many years to come. But Hollywood as we know it -- big feature films starring name-brand actors -- is following Broadway in its progression from the very centre of American consciousness to the fringe. The time is not far distant when the Oscars will become what the Tony awards are now: an annual occasion for remembering better days gone by.
START WITH THESE COMPARISONS:
In 2004, Americans spent more on video games than they did to go to the movies: US$11.3-billion v. US$9.4-billion.
No movie in American history has earned more in its first weekend than Spiderman, which grossed some US$114-million. The biggest new game of 2004, Halo 2, grossed US$125-million in its first 24 hours.
It's true that the movie industry as a whole continues to hold a huge lead over the video game industry. Add in movie rentals, pay-per-view, DVD sales, the revenues of HBO-type movie channels, and motion-picture revenues add up to a grand total of about US$45-billion. International sales raise that total still higher.
But that US$45-billion includes a lot of businesses that are not exactly "Hollywood." Pay-per-view for example is dominated by sporting events: Six of the 10 all-time highest-grossing pay-per-view programs were Mike Tyson boxing matches, including the biggest of them all, the 1997 fight in which Tyson was disqualified for biting the ear of Evander Holyfield.
In the rental and DVD sale market, meanwhile, pornography and animation loom very large. Porn accounts for an estimated 25% of all rentals. Eight of Billboard's top 10 VHS bestsellers last week were animated, as were three of the bestselling five DVDs.
Yes, the market for motion-picture entertainment may continue to grow. But as it grows, it fractures into steadily smaller pieces, just as music, television and print have each previously done.
This fracturing of the market has made possible for movies that would once have seemed impossibly quirky to find their audience -- such as this season's middle-aged, middle-class favorite, Sideways. But it means that few if any movies -- non-animated movies, anyway -- can achieve the kind of broad cultural impact that was once achieved by films like The Godfather or Star Wars.
This fragmentation of the audience suggests why video games in particular are such a lethal threat to Hollywood. The biggest single movie-going segment of the population is the group aged 16 to 21. Older groups have each in their way been drawn away from the theatres -- and once they are walking the aisles at Blockbuster, they are shopping not from the 400 or 500 new films Hollywood may offer in any given year, but from a menu of 10,000 choices.
Since the advent of the videocassette machine and the ability to watch movies at home, it has been teenagers who make the hits -- and what teenagers want is action-adventure movies with spectacular special effects: super-heroes who race through the canyons of Manhattan on spider threads or who battle the hosts of Mordor with magical powers. Video games offer teenagers this alternative: Instead of some actor performing the stunts and fighting the battles, the star of the show can be ... you.
As competition intensifies for teen dollars, Hollywood's mega-hits have ceased to be quite as mega as they used to be. It's striking, I think, that of the top five grossing movies of all time, only one -- Shrek 2 -- was made in the past five years.
Some moviegoers -- and even some in Hollywood -- may welcome the relative decline of the teen market, because it creates opportunities for more grown-up movies to get made and find their audience. 2005 is being hailed as a banner year for adult films, in the old-fashioned sense of the term. The last great era of American cinema was the period from about 1969 (the year Francis Ford Coppola founded his independent production company, American Zoetrope) until about 1981, when VHS sales took off and the adults abandoned movie theatres to kids too young to date. Maybe once the studios absorb the news that the kids prefer X-Box to multiplexes, they will stop making Troys and resume looking for the next Chinatown. Maybe.
But while the makers of grown-up movies can take pride (if they are successful) in a job well done, and can even make a handsome profit if they know their business, they are unlikely to become screamingly super-rich -- and becoming screamingly super-rich is what Hollywood is all about. So the likelihood is that the harder it becomes to make a mega-hit, the more desperately and hysterically Hollywood will try. They will look for new taboos to violate, new shocks to deliver: first offending and then boring their audiences in a frantic desire to please them.
That's the vicious cycle that killed Broadway -- is killing pop music -- and to which no entertainment industry is immune: not even the great dream factory on the California coast.